Media content delivery continues shifting from traditional broadcast distribution to online or over-the-top (OTT) distribution. Online or OTT distribution relies on digital networks to provide live, linear, or on-demand streams to different digital devices.
This shift has increased the demand on the digital networks. More and more bandwidth is consumed as content consumers shift to online or OTT distribution. The increased network demand also stems from growing media content size due to increased quality (e.g., 4K) and features (e.g., High Dynamic Range, wider spatial sound, etc).
The increased availability of media content online and the higher quality delivery of that content have also increased demand on cloud based encoding platforms, especially as media content providers move away from deploying and managing local encoding hardware resources to instead use the much more cost effective, reliable, and faster performing shared encoding resources of a cloud based encoding platform. Media content providers can focus on media content creation while the third-party cloud based encoding platform focuses on deploying, managing, maintaining, upgrading, and allocating the resources to different media content providers in an optimal manner that maximizes resource usage. In particular, the cloud based encoding platform allocates encoding resources to different media content providers as needed, thereby maximizing overall resource usage with lower overall cost.
An effective cloud based encoding platform is one that can dynamically and quickly scale its resources as demand and usage increases beyond a current resource allocation. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a cloud based encoding platform with a scalable architecture. More specifically, there is a need to scale the resources in a seamless manner, whereby additional resources can be introduced as part of the platform with minimal affect or change to the existing resources.